The ultimate follower

I was tempted to name this post "In praise of followers"* because this is exactly what I want to outline.
For too long companies made it appear that leadership was the ultimate goal for a successful career, ignoring to nurture followership skills.
Take a look at that article if you are interested to understand the "effective follower"...and take away the following advice: choose a great leader and follow him, sink him in, obey him and be proud of him.
Your life is gonna be easy...nanos gigantum humeris insidentes ("dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants")

*By Robert E. Kelley, Harvard business review, 66(6), 142 - 148

Il cielo e' di nuovo azzurro

Amo l'Italia, la mia terra, la terra di una grande civilta', dove ogni piccolo buco ha una storia e un richiamo alle nostre radici.
Benvenuta la vittoria del PdL e la completa debacle di quella esiziale frangia comunista che tanto male ha fatto e continua a fare in ogni luogo della terra dove tenta di insediarsi.

Bones and muscles

Fortunately, despite all human flaws, many leaders kicked in. To some extent, it's possible to observe many beneficial traits and reason out some recurrent patterns.

As I see it, a leader is dominated by two main forces: a vast skill set and knowledge and what is called "effective attitude".
The first force is potentially within anybody's grasp.
The latter one is what I generally refer to as the trait without a name. You can't actually create it "from nil". Yet you can pull it out, shape it and ameliorate it (assuming there is something there :-)

In a previous comment I used the bones methaphor, it goes as follow: "being a leader is a matter of bones, if you got them you can put on muscles and coach them."

However, not being a leader is very very convenient...check out the upcoming post.

Leaders for sale

Do you want to know why you'll never see a "true" leader in action? Let's think about the huge amount of material available and try to draw the simplest conclusion.

Who will be so supernatural to incarnate those attitudes? Did you ever deeply read those publications and thought of any possible implication?

Please, now think of a person who shows: passion, vision, delegation, intelligence, realism, listening, decisiveness, flexibility, and so on.
Come on guys, let's be real!

Not to mention who tries to sell and convince that there is a leader in you. You only need practice et voila' you wake up and say: I'm a leader!
Come on guys, don't buy it. It's a gyp.

My conclusion? Well, have you ever thought of that human beings are flawed? Oh yes!, good time then to start and see from a more realistic and human perspective what's going on in here :-)

Stay tuned, new posts on this around the corner.